The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) (13 page)

VELVET

Do not volunteer for something until you’re sure it doesn’t include manual labor.
Book of Velvet
.

Maybe I need a new book,
I told myself as I wrestled shrink wrap around a pallet of boxes in the courtyard of the Rocket Garden. Each of them was marked
CANNED FOOD
, but that’s not what they contained. Who knew the local food pantry dished out a little revolution on the side?

I wiped the sweat from my face with the tail of my Ramones T-shirt and climbed back up to the dome. Inside Becca, Lanky Girl (a.k.a., Lina), Big Steven, and I were packing up the radios we’d made. It was almost July, and it would’ve been as sweltering inside the dome as out, if Lina hadn’t rigged up a tiny air conditioner. She was clever, but not much of a conversationalist.

“Is Dune coming in today?” I asked. He at least liked to talk.

“Haven’t seen him.” Steven shrugged. “The food bank guy will be here after dark to pick up the radios,” he said, changing the subject. “We need to hustle to pack this last stack of boxes and lift the pallets over the fence.” Steven had built this small crane out of spare radio tower parts to lug things around the Garden.

“Yessir,” I said, diving back into the radio packing. When Steven had a bug up his butt about getting something done, it was best not to mess with him.

I wrapped a plain plastic box with hand-painted dials in old paper and stuffed it into a cardboard box. Winter would have made these things look cool with gears and copper tubes and stuff. Hell, I’d never even seen a radio before meeting this crew. The radios were like something out of a history book on consumer electronics, but Becca said they could pick up the MemeCast and anything else on those frequencies. And if they picked up the MemeCast, they’d pick up the concert. It was going to be epic.

“Incoming!” one of the guys yelled from the courtyard.

“Hide the radios,” Steve said quietly as he strode toward the door. His bulk filled the door frame, blotting out a bit of the daylight.

“Where?” I looked around quickly. We were in the middle of a hollowed-out piece of machinery with only a bunch of folding tables and chairs.

“In the boxes.” Lina was already stuffing the empty boxes with radios, and I followed suit.

“False alarm.” Steven stepped aside, and I heard footsteps coming up the ladder. “It’s your boyfriend. The new one.”

Lina glared at me and at all the boxes we now had to empty and repack.

“Actually, I need to talk to Dune,” Aiden said to Steven without even looking in my direction. There was something manic in his voice. It reminded me of Winter. Winter on one of her not-so-good days.

“Aiden, what’s the matter?” I was by his side before I even realized it. He shrugged off my touch.

“Sorry, I don’t have time to explain, but I need to find Roger.” He looked from me to Steven. I wasn’t sure who he was apologizing to or asking.

“Don’t you work with him?” I asked.

“He’s gone, and I got kicked out. Dad’s in trouble. I need Roger’s help,” Aiden said without taking a breath.

Steven disappeared.

“Slow down. What’s going on?” I’d never seen Aiden upset.

“I’ll explain later.”

Steven reappeared and handed Aiden a small padded envelope. “Roger left this for you. Take it and go. We’ve got work to do here.”

That last part was directed at me. I took the hint and guided Aiden toward the door. My heart ached to see him like this. Scared. “What can I do?” I asked.

His mobile buzzed as we hit daylight.

“Slow down,” he said into the phone as he clambered down the steps. He stopped and listened.

“I’ll be right back,” I called to Steven as I followed Aiden to the courtyard.

“Don’t worry, Aunt Spring. I’ll find her.” Aiden snapped his mobile shut. “It’s Winter. She’s missing.”

Instead of panic, though, I saw relief on Aiden’s face.

“It worked.” He grinned.

I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

“Don’t worry. I know exactly where she is.” He pecked me on the cheek and took off running.

“Bring her to the concert!” I yelled after him.

I immediately regretted it. When you don’t know what to say, do not scream something self-centered and lame.
Book of Velvet.
New chapter. New verse.

WINTER

I slipped in the back way, through the semi-secret panel in the fence. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to Grandfather yet. The hummingbirds were still battling the pudding in my brain.
Damn pills. I’ll never take another one again. Not even an aspirin.

Grandfather’s
Sasuke
course looked like someone had begun stripping the parts and dismantling it.
Maybe he’s redoing it,
I told myself. He wouldn’t give up on it. He’d used the course every day since I’d moved in.

I pushed through the bamboo gate, through the garden, and into my workshop. I grabbed some circuit boards, a soldering iron, and a sheet of milky white Plexiglas.

I had this vision in my head of a wall of bird wings that reacted to your movement, curling and flittering as you got closer, rippling as you walked along the wall. I scrounged through my buckets of circuit boards and found a motion activator. I cut out a test sliver of the Plexiglas in a wing shape.

The hummingbird wings in my head calmed to a dull flutter as I started soldering chips and dipswitches and connectors.

I’d missed this. I needed this. I was this. And I could make this installation huge.

“Winter?”

Crap.

At least it wasn’t Mom or Dad. It was Aiden. I turned around to find him and Grandfather both looking at me as if they expected me to say something momentous. It was unnerving—and really bugged the shit out of me.

“What?” I didn’t mask my annoyance very well. “Can’t you see I’m working?”

“Yes!” Aiden did a little fist pump thing like he’d scored a goal. “She’s back.”

Grandfather just smiled and said
he’d
be right back.

“You have been a zombie—Stepford Winter—for the past few weeks.” Aiden wrapped me in a hug.

“Stupid pills,” I muttered.

“That’s why I substituted vitamin D for them.” The shiny things on the workbench caught his attention. He picked up my prototype. “What are you making?”

“You switched my pills?” Why didn’t I think of that? Because my brain was full of pudding, and I thought my parents had my best interests at heart. It made me happier than I could describe to know my cousin had my back like that. “Thanks,” I said quietly. I was trying really hard not to cry.

“You needed the vitamins. You don’t get enough sun—usually.” He was trying not to look at me.

“Oh, shut up.” I took the circuit board from his hand.

It was good to be back. Grandfather brought out two mugs of double-espresso, six-sugar love.

Okay, Aiden’s had only four sugars.

Aiden’s happy mask slipped away as he sipped his coffee.

“It’s your dad, isn’t it?” I asked.

“You were right about Japan,” Aiden replied.

“I’d started to put it together before the doctor drugged me.”

Aiden explained everything he’d figured out about the chip, his Dad’s involvement, right up to the freakish demonstration with my parents.

“Kuso,”
Grandfather swore.

“Then there was the bombing in the Nomura parking lot—and the mayor and some Green Zone goons paid a visit to Dad at the office—right before he sent me home with Jao.”

Aiden paused.

“Dad came home this morning—with a chip in his head and a new bodyguard,” Aiden continued quietly.

Holy crap.

“We have to stop them,” he said.

I had more questions, many more, but they could wait. We had to get our family back—all of them.

Grandfather and I nodded.

“Before they do whatever they’re gonna do July first,” Aiden added.

That didn’t give us much time. About forty-eight hours.

AIDEN

We retreated to Winter’s workshop. Mr. Yamada said he had some appointments at his shop—but not to do anything stupid yet. At least not until he got back.

“So we need to hack TFC. Without them knowing. And then stop them. All in two days?” Winter asked.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “Well, I hope not. We just need to send a signal to the chip to erase the embedded memories or shut down the feed.”

“Is that all?” Winter laughed. “It might be easier if we had a chip.”

“Good thing I have one.” I dumped my backpack on the table. The package Dad had given me and Roger’s mystery envelope lay there among the other detritus of my life. “Dad gave me this,” I said, handing Winter the package. Then I opened the envelope from Roger. Inside was a black plastic square about 3.5 inches in size. It was a museum piece. “Are you kidding me?”

“Roger must have given you that,” she said casually.

“How did you know?” I waggled the disk at Winter.

She took it from me and popped it into an ancient computer under her workbench.

“Do you know what workshop he taught at the Rocket Garden?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer.

“How to build your own underground network out of scrap and outdated tech. Like this.” She uncovered an old flatscreen monitor. “And that,” she added, pointing to a series of routers atop one of the shelves.

A real underground network. A network like this had the range of a few hundred square feet. Doesn’t sound like much—until you tie a bunch of these handmade networks together.

“Is that what you’re running your garden on?” I asked. Each moving statue seemed to interact with the next and could be controlled remotely.

Winter nodded. “In exchange, I showed Roger how to make an FM transmitter.”

And your transmitter broadcasts on the same frequency as the chip and the MemeCast.
This was no coincidence. Was Roger the technical wizard behind the MemeCast—and did he have plans for it all along?

“So what’s on the disk?” I asked.

“Hell if I know.” She spun the monitor toward me.

The disk was encrypted.

“Typical Roger paranoia,” Winter muttered.

“Not so paranoid if people are after you.”

The code scrawled across the old monitor. It was very hard to visualize it in 2-D, but it looked a little familiar. I clunked around on the old fashioned keyboard for a while but couldn’t seem to turn the code over in my mind. I pulled out my mobile, disconnected it from the grid, and downloaded the code.

And there it was. A hard, glossy knot of gorgeous code with no visible door to pull on.

This was the encryption Mom had given me to crack on the plane. The new encryption algorithm of Banc Raush. Or was it? Did TFC pressure her company, too? Had they developed the code for memories rather than money? Data was data.

I still had the decryption key on my mobile.

The door unlocked.

A long line of numbers and letters wrapped across the bottom of the screen. The other key.

With both, I could hack the ID chips.

But we just needed one more thing.

TFC communicated with the chip on the same frequency as Winter’s FM transmitter—and the MemeCast.

“We need to call Velvet,” I said finally.

VELVET

Big night.

Everything was set. Aiden and Winter’s plan was a nobrainer for me. Becca agreed, too. Now I could really do something.
I hope they make it to the concert.

I set up Lina at the door with a walkie, a police scanner, and the panic button Steven’s crew had made. Dune was still a no-show. Lina explained the security system. The battery-run lights would flash if the cops were on their way. I told her to hit it if she saw anything suspicious, too. Oh, and no alcohol through the door. We didn’t want people getting stupid.

The band began their sound check. Now I just had to wait and see if anyone showed.

My biggest fear is throwing a party and no one shows up.

It happened to me in sixth grade. I’d invited a handful of popular girls—like Maia Jackson, who I’d been friends with in elementary school—to my birthday party. No one showed up—or even asked about the party later. It was just me and Mom and my grandmother and a huge clown-shaped ice cream cake she’d picked out.

I haven’t thrown a party since.

A former chapter in the
Book of Velvet
.

The band finished its sound check. I was having clown-cake flashbacks as I watched the door. Nada.

Aiden probably wasn’t coming, either.

Why did I say no alcohol?

Spike jumped down from the stage, which wasn’t much more than a bunch of wooden pallets nailed together. He slung his arm around my shoulders. “They’ll come. Curfew be damned.”

I had to admit that Spike knew when to say the right thing. I kissed his cheek. He took my face gently in his hand and planted a wet one on my lips. After a second, I returned the kiss gratefully.

“Get a room, you two,” a voice said from the door. Big Steven and his crew strolled in—followed by a stream of kids.

“They got lost.” Steven jerked his thumb toward the crowd beginning to fill up the entry.

I told Spike to go get ready.

“Oh, I’m ready,” he said adjusting his crotch.

I had to admit that Spike also knew how to say the wrong thing at the right time. He grinned and leaned in to give me another quick kiss.

I shook my head and pushed him toward the stage. He was still grinning.

I started shooing the partiers toward the stage and refreshment area (sodas only). While I was doing that, I heard the Steven reunion playing out behind me.

“Little bro, you’ve grown.” Little brother was now taller than big brother. Big Steven wrapped Little Steven in a bear hug. Micah always said their parents had no imagination.

Micah. I scanned the growing sea of faces for him. He should be out of juvie by now, and I hoped he’d seen one of the flyers.

The band was about to take the stage when I spotted his curly mop trying to push its way through the crowd. I waded in but didn’t make much headway.

“Micah!” I called. The crowd let him through.

The guys saw him, too. They jumped off the platform and practically tackled him before I even had a chance to say a word.

Things were working out far better than I’d expected. If only Winter and Aiden would get here, then we’d all be together again.

Micah explained that he’d just gotten out of juvie last week. He’d tried to call everyone, but his mobile was blocked. He’d gotten our flyer from someone at the food bank, where he was doing his community service.

We spelled out everything the best we could—about the
Memento
s and how he’d been brain-bleached—but he hardly believed what had happened. (Micah was our resident conspiracy theory nut, but I guess you don’t believe it when it’s really happening to you.)

The crowd started chanting “play, play.”

I motioned the guys toward the stage. We’d have plenty of time to catch up later.

The crowd stopped chanting as Spike strapped on his guitar and walked to the mike. He tapped it a few times and cleared his throat.

“Before we get started,” he said, “let’s give a shout out to my girl, Velvet, for organizing this whole thing.”

The crowd chanted “Velvet” until Spike pulled me up on stage.

I was floating.